DESCRIPTION

List commits that are reachable by following the parent links from the
given commit(s), but exclude commits that are reachable from the one(s)
given with a ^ in front of them. The output is given in reverse
chronological order by default.

You can think of this as a set operation. Commits given on the command
line form a set of commits that are reachable from any of them, and then
commits reachable from any of the ones given with ^ in front are
subtracted from that set. The remaining commits are what comes out in the
command's output. Various other options and paths parameters can be used
to further limit the result.

Thus, the following command:

$ git rev-list foo bar ^baz

means "list all the commits which are reachable from foo or bar, but
not from baz".

A special notation "<commit1>..<commit2>" can be used as a
short-hand for "^<commit1><commit2>". For example, either of
the following may be used interchangeably:

$ git rev-list origin..HEAD
$ git rev-list HEAD ^origin

Another special notation is "<commit1>...<commit2>" which is useful
for merges. The resulting set of commits is the symmetric difference
between the two operands. The following two commands are equivalent:

rev-list is a very essential git command, since it
provides the ability to build and traverse commit ancestry graphs. For
this reason, it has a lot of different options that enables it to be
used by commands as different as git bisect and
git repack.

OPTIONS

Commit Formatting

Pretty-print the contents of the commit logs in a given format,
where <format> can be one of oneline, short, medium,
full, fuller, email, raw and format:<string>. See
the "PRETTY FORMATS" section for some additional details for each
format. When omitted, the format defaults to medium.

Note: you can specify the default pretty format in the repository
configuration (see git-config(1)).

--abbrev-commit

Instead of showing the full 40-byte hexadecimal commit object
name, show only a partial prefix. Non default number of
digits can be specified with "--abbrev=<n>" (which also modifies
diff output, if it is displayed).

This should make "--pretty=oneline" a whole lot more readable for
people using 80-column terminals.

--oneline

This is a shorthand for "--pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit"
used together.

--encoding[=<encoding>]

The commit objects record the encoding used for the log message
in their encoding header; this option can be used to tell the
command to re-code the commit log message in the encoding
preferred by the user. For non plumbing commands this
defaults to UTF-8.

--no-notes

--show-notes[=<ref>]

Show the notes (see git-notes(1)) that annotate the
commit, when showing the commit log message. This is the default
for git log, git show and git whatchanged commands when
there is no --pretty, --format nor --oneline option is
given on the command line.

With an optional argument, add this ref to the list of notes. The ref
is taken to be in refs/notes/ if it is not qualified.

--[no-]standard-notes

Enable or disable populating the notes ref list from the
core.notesRef and notes.displayRef variables (or
corresponding environment overrides). Enabled by default.
See git-config(1).

--relative-date

Synonym for --date=relative.

--date=(relative|local|default|iso|rfc|short|raw)

Only takes effect for dates shown in human-readable format, such
as when using "--pretty". log.date config variable sets a default
value for log command's --date option.

--date=relative shows dates relative to the current time,
e.g. "2 hours ago".

--date=default shows timestamps in the original timezone
(either committer's or author's).

--header

Print the contents of the commit in raw-format; each record is
separated with a NUL character.

--parents

Print also the parents of the commit (in the form "commit parent...").
Also enables parent rewriting, see History Simplification below.

--children

Print also the children of the commit (in the form "commit child...").
Also enables parent rewriting, see History Simplification below.

--timestamp

Print the raw commit timestamp.

--left-right

Mark which side of a symmetric diff a commit is reachable from.
Commits from the left side are prefixed with < and those from
the right with >. If combined with --boundary, those
commits are prefixed with -.

Draw a text-based graphical representation of the commit history
on the left hand side of the output. This may cause extra lines
to be printed in between commits, in order for the graph history
to be drawn properly.

This enables parent rewriting, see History Simplification below.

This implies the --topo-order option by default, but the
--date-order option may also be specified.

--count

Print a number stating how many commits would have been
listed, and suppress all other output. When used together
with --left-right, instead print the counts for left and
right commits, separated by a tab.

Commit Limiting

Besides specifying a range of commits that should be listed using the
special notations explained in the description, additional commit
limiting may be applied.

Limit the commits output to ones with log message that
matches the specified pattern (regular expression).

--all-match

Limit the commits output to ones that match all given --grep,
--author and --committer instead of ones that match at least one.

-i

--regexp-ignore-case

Match the regexp limiting patterns without regard to letters case.

-E

--extended-regexp

Consider the limiting patterns to be extended regular expressions
instead of the default basic regular expressions.

-F

--fixed-strings

Consider the limiting patterns to be fixed strings (don't interpret
pattern as a regular expression).

--remove-empty

Stop when a given path disappears from the tree.

--merges

Print only merge commits.

--no-merges

Do not print commits with more than one parent.

--first-parent

Follow only the first parent commit upon seeing a merge
commit. This option can give a better overview when
viewing the evolution of a particular topic branch,
because merges into a topic branch tend to be only about
adjusting to updated upstream from time to time, and
this option allows you to ignore the individual commits
brought in to your history by such a merge.

--not

Reverses the meaning of the ^ prefix (or lack thereof)
for all following revision specifiers, up to the next --not.

--all

Pretend as if all the refs in refs/ are listed on the
command line as <commit>.

--branches[=<pattern>]

Pretend as if all the refs in refs/heads are listed
on the command line as <commit>. If <pattern> is given, limit
branches to ones matching given shell glob. If pattern lacks ?,
, or [, / at the end is implied.

--tags[=<pattern>]

Pretend as if all the refs in refs/tags are listed
on the command line as <commit>. If <pattern> is given, limit
tags to ones matching given shell glob. If pattern lacks ?, ,
or [, / at the end is implied.

--remotes[=<pattern>]

Pretend as if all the refs in refs/remotes are listed
on the command line as <commit>. If <pattern> is given, limit
remote-tracking branches to ones matching given shell glob.
If pattern lacks ?, , or [, / at the end is implied.

--glob=<glob-pattern>

Pretend as if all the refs matching shell glob <glob-pattern>
are listed on the command line as <commit>. Leading refs/,
is automatically prepended if missing. If pattern lacks ?, ,
or [, / at the end is implied.

--stdin

In addition to the <commit> listed on the command
line, read them from the standard input. If a -- separator is
seen, stop reading commits and start reading paths to limit the
result.

--quiet

Don't print anything to standard output. This form
is primarily meant to allow the caller to
test the exit status to see if a range of objects is fully
connected (or not). It is faster than redirecting stdout
to /dev/null as the output does not have to be formatted.

--cherry-pick

Omit any commit that introduces the same change as
another commit on the "other side" when the set of
commits are limited with symmetric difference.

For example, if you have two branches, A and B, a usual way
to list all commits on only one side of them is with
--left-right, like the example above in the description of
that option. It however shows the commits that were cherry-picked
from the other branch (for example, "3rd on b" may be cherry-picked
from branch A). With this option, such pairs of commits are
excluded from the output.

-g

--walk-reflogs

Instead of walking the commit ancestry chain, walk
reflog entries from the most recent one to older ones.
When this option is used you cannot specify commits to
exclude (that is, ^commit, commit1..commit2,
nor commit1\...commit2 notations cannot be used).

With --pretty format other than oneline (for obvious reasons),
this causes the output to have two extra lines of information
taken from the reflog. By default, commit@{Nth} notation is
used in the output. When the starting commit is specified as
commit@{now}, output also uses commit@{timestamp} notation
instead. Under --pretty=oneline, the commit message is
prefixed with this information on the same line.
This option cannot be combined with --reverse.
See also git-reflog(1).

--merge

After a failed merge, show refs that touch files having a
conflict and don't exist on all heads to merge.

--boundary

Output uninteresting commits at the boundary, which are usually
not shown.

History Simplification

Sometimes you are only interested in parts of the history, for example the
commits modifying a particular <path>. But there are two parts of
History Simplification, one part is selecting the commits and the other
is how to do it, as there are various strategies to simplify the history.

The following options select the commits to be shown:

<paths>

Commits modifying the given <paths> are selected.

--simplify-by-decoration

Commits that are referred by some branch or tag are selected.

Note that extra commits can be shown to give a meaningful history.

The following options affect the way the simplification is performed:

Default mode

Simplifies the history to the simplest history explaining the
final state of the tree. Simplest because it prunes some side
branches if the end result is the same (i.e. merging branches
with the same content)

--full-history

As the default mode but does not prune some history.

--dense

Only the selected commits are shown, plus some to have a
meaningful history.

--sparse

All commits in the simplified history are shown.

--simplify-merges

Additional option to --full-history to remove some needless
merges from the resulting history, as there are no selected
commits contributing to this merge.

--ancestry-path

When given a range of commits to display (e.g. commit1..commit2
or commit2 ^commit1), only display commits that exist
directly on the ancestry chain between the commit1 and
commit2, i.e. commits that are both descendants of commit1,
and ancestors of commit2.

A more detailed explanation follows.

Suppose you specified foo as the <paths>. We shall call commits
that modify foo !TREESAME, and the rest TREESAME. (In a diff
filtered for foo, they look different and equal, respectively.)

In the following, we will always refer to the same example history to
illustrate the differences between simplification settings. We assume

that you are filtering for a file foo in this commit graph:

.-A---M---N---O---P
/ / / / /
I B C D E
\ / / / /
`-------------'

The horizontal line of history A--P is taken to be the first parent of
each merge. The commits are:
* `I` is the initial commit, in which `foo` exists with contents
"asdf", and a file `quux` exists with contents "quux". Initial
commits are compared to an empty tree, so `I` is !TREESAME.
* In `A`, `foo` contains just "foo".
* `B` contains the same change as `A`. Its merge `M` is trivial and
hence TREESAME to all parents.
* `C` does not change `foo`, but its merge `N` changes it to "foobar",
so it is not TREESAME to any parent.
* `D` sets `foo` to "baz". Its merge `O` combines the strings from
`N` and `D` to "foobarbaz"; i.e., it is not TREESAME to any parent.
* `E` changes `quux` to "xyzzy", and its merge `P` combines the
strings to "quux xyzzy". Despite appearing interesting, `P` is
TREESAME to all parents.
'rev-list' walks backwards through history, including or excluding
commits based on whether '\--full-history' and/or parent rewriting
(via '\--parents' or '\--children') are used. The following settings
are available.
Default mode::
Commits are included if they are not TREESAME to any parent
(though this can be changed, see '\--sparse' below). If the
commit was a merge, and it was TREESAME to one parent, follow
only that parent. (Even if there are several TREESAME
parents, follow only one of them.) Otherwise, follow all
parents.
+
This results in:
+

.-A---N---O
/ / /
I---------D

+
Note how the rule to only follow the TREESAME parent, if one is
available, removed `B` from consideration entirely. `C` was
considered via `N`, but is TREESAME. Root commits are compared to an
empty tree, so `I` is !TREESAME.
+
Parent/child relations are only visible with --parents, but that does
not affect the commits selected in default mode, so we have shown the
parent lines.
--full-history without parent rewriting::
This mode differs from the default in one point: always follow
all parents of a merge, even if it is TREESAME to one of them.
Even if more than one side of the merge has commits that are
included, this does not imply that the merge itself is! In
the example, we get
+

I A B N D O

+
`P` and `M` were excluded because they are TREESAME to a parent. `E`,
`C` and `B` were all walked, but only `B` was !TREESAME, so the others
do not appear.
+
Note that without parent rewriting, it is not really possible to talk
about the parent/child relationships between the commits, so we show
them disconnected.
--full-history with parent rewriting::
Ordinary commits are only included if they are !TREESAME
(though this can be changed, see '\--sparse' below).
+
Merges are always included. However, their parent list is rewritten:
Along each parent, prune away commits that are not included
themselves. This results in
+

.-A---M---N---O---P
/ / / / /
I B / D /
\ / / / /
`-------------'

+
Compare to '\--full-history' without rewriting above. Note that `E`
was pruned away because it is TREESAME, but the parent list of P was
rewritten to contain `E`'s parent `I`. The same happened for `C` and
`N`. Note also that `P` was included despite being TREESAME.
In addition to the above settings, you can change whether TREESAME
affects inclusion:
--dense::
Commits that are walked are included if they are not TREESAME
to any parent.
--sparse::
All commits that are walked are included.
+
Note that without '\--full-history', this still simplifies merges: if
one of the parents is TREESAME, we follow only that one, so the other
sides of the merge are never walked.
--simplify-merges::
First, build a history graph in the same way that
'\--full-history' with parent rewriting does (see above).
+
Then simplify each commit `C` to its replacement `C'` in the final
history according to the following rules:
+
--
* Set `C'` to `C`.
+
* Replace each parent `P` of `C'` with its simplification `P'`. In
the process, drop parents that are ancestors of other parents, and
remove duplicates.
+
* If after this parent rewriting, `C'` is a root or merge commit (has
zero or >1 parents), a boundary commit, or !TREESAME, it remains.
Otherwise, it is replaced with its only parent.
--
+
The effect of this is best shown by way of comparing to
'\--full-history' with parent rewriting. The example turns into:
+

.-A---M---N---O
/ / /
I B D
\ / /
`---------'

+
Note the major differences in `N` and `P` over '\--full-history':
+
--
* `N`'s parent list had `I` removed, because it is an ancestor of the
other parent `M`. Still, `N` remained because it is !TREESAME.
+
* `P`'s parent list similarly had `I` removed. `P` was then
removed completely, because it had one parent and is TREESAME.
--
Finally, there is a fifth simplification mode available:
--ancestry-path::
Limit the displayed commits to those directly on the ancestry
chain between the "from" and "to" commits in the given commit
range. I.e. only display commits that are ancestor of the "to"
commit, and descendants of the "from" commit.
+
As an example use case, consider the following commit history:
+

+
A regular 'D..M' computes the set of commits that are ancestors of `M`,
but excludes the ones that are ancestors of `D`. This is useful to see
what happened to the history leading to `M` since `D`, in the sense
that "what does `M` have that did not exist in `D`". The result in this
example would be all the commits, except `A` and `B` (and `D` itself,
of course).
+
When we want to find out what commits in `M` are contaminated with the
bug introduced by `D` and need fixing, however, we might want to view
only the subset of 'D..M' that are actually descendants of `D`, i.e.
excluding `C` and `K`. This is exactly what the '\--ancestry-path'
option does. Applied to the 'D..M' range, it results in:
+

E-------F
\ \
G---H---I---J
\
L--M

The '\--simplify-by-decoration' option allows you to view only the
big picture of the topology of the history, by omitting commits
that are not referenced by tags. Commits are marked as !TREESAME
(in other words, kept after history simplification rules described
above) if (1) they are referenced by tags, or (2) they change the
contents of the paths given on the command line. All other
commits are marked as TREESAME (subject to be simplified away).
Bisection Helpers
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
--bisect::
Limit output to the one commit object which is roughly halfway between
included and excluded commits. Note that the bad bisection ref
`refs/bisect/bad` is added to the included commits (if it
exists) and the good bisection refs `refs/bisect/good-*` are
added to the excluded commits (if they exist). Thus, supposing there
are no refs in `refs/bisect/`, if

$ git rev-list --bisect foo ^bar ^baz

outputs 'midpoint', the output of the two commands

$ git rev-list foo ^midpoint
$ git rev-list midpoint ^bar ^baz

would be of roughly the same length. Finding the change which
introduces a regression is thus reduced to a binary search: repeatedly
generate and test new 'midpoint's until the commit chain is of length
one.
--bisect-vars::
This calculates the same as `--bisect`, except that refs in
`refs/bisect/` are not used, and except that this outputs
text ready to be eval'ed by the shell. These lines will assign the
name of the midpoint revision to the variable `bisect_rev`, and the
expected number of commits to be tested after `bisect_rev` is tested
to `bisect_nr`, the expected number of commits to be tested if
`bisect_rev` turns out to be good to `bisect_good`, the expected
number of commits to be tested if `bisect_rev` turns out to be bad to
`bisect_bad`, and the number of commits we are bisecting right now to
`bisect_all`.
--bisect-all::
This outputs all the commit objects between the included and excluded
commits, ordered by their distance to the included and excluded
commits. Refs in `refs/bisect/` are not used. The farthest
from them is displayed first. (This is the only one displayed by
`--bisect`.)
+
This is useful because it makes it easy to choose a good commit to
test when you want to avoid to test some of them for some reason (they
may not compile for example).
+
This option can be used along with `--bisect-vars`, in this case,
after all the sorted commit objects, there will be the same text as if
`--bisect-vars` had been used alone.
Commit Ordering
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
By default, the commits are shown in reverse chronological order.
--topo-order::
This option makes them appear in topological order (i.e.
descendant commits are shown before their parents).
--date-order::
This option is similar to '--topo-order' in the sense that no
parent comes before all of its children, but otherwise things
are still ordered in the commit timestamp order.
--reverse::
Output the commits in reverse order.
Cannot be combined with '\--walk-reflogs'.
Object Traversal
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
These options are mostly targeted for packing of git repositories.
--objects::
Print the object IDs of any object referenced by the listed
commits. '--objects foo ^bar' thus means "send me
all object IDs which I need to download if I have the commit
object 'bar', but not 'foo'".
--objects-edge::
Similar to '--objects', but also print the IDs of excluded
commits prefixed with a "-" character. This is used by
linkgit:git-pack-objects[1] to build "thin" pack, which records
objects in deltified form based on objects contained in these
excluded commits to reduce network traffic.
--unpacked::
Only useful with '--objects'; print the object IDs that are not
in packs.
--no-walk::
Only show the given revs, but do not traverse their ancestors.
--do-walk::
Overrides a previous --no-walk.
PRETTY FORMATS

If the commit is a merge, and if the pretty-format
is not oneline, email or raw, an additional line is
inserted before the Author: line. This line begins with
"Merge: " and the sha1s of ancestral commits are printed,
separated by spaces. Note that the listed commits may not
necessarily be the list of the direct parent commits if you
have limited your view of history: for example, if you are
only interested in changes related to a certain directory or
file.

There are several built-in formats, and you can define
additional formats by setting a pretty.<name>
config option to either another format name, or a
format: string, as described below (see
git-config(1)). Here are the details of the
built-in formats:

The raw format shows the entire commit exactly as
stored in the commit object. Notably, the SHA1s are
displayed in full, regardless of whether --abbrev or
--no-abbrev are used, and parents information show the
true parent commits, without taking grafts nor history
simplification into account.

format:<string>

The format:<string> format allows you to specify which information
you want to show. It works a little bit like printf format,
with the notable exception that you get a newline with %n
instead of \n.

E.g, format:"The author of %h was %an, %ar%nThe title was >>%s<<%n"
would show something like this:

The author of fe6e0ee was Junio C Hamano, 23 hours ago
The title was >>t4119: test autocomputing -p<n> for traditional diff input.<<

%C(...): color specification, as described in color.branch.* config option

%m: left, right or boundary mark

%n: newline

%%: a raw %

%x00: print a byte from a hex code

%w([<w>[,<i1>[,<i2>]]]): switch line wrapping, like the -w option of
git-shortlog(1).

Note

Some placeholders may depend on other options given to the
revision traversal engine. For example, the %g* reflog options will
insert an empty string unless we are traversing reflog entries (e.g., by
git log -g). The %d placeholder will use the "short" decoration
format if --decorate was not already provided on the command line.

If you add a + (plus sign) after % of a placeholder, a line-feed
is inserted immediately before the expansion if and only if the
placeholder expands to a non-empty string.

If you add a - (minus sign) after % of a placeholder, line-feeds that
immediately precede the expansion are deleted if and only if the
placeholder expands to an empty string.

If you add a (space) after % of a placeholder, a space
is inserted immediately before the expansion if and only if the
placeholder expands to a non-empty string.

tformat:

The tformat: format works exactly like format:, except that it
provides "terminator" semantics instead of "separator" semantics. In
other words, each commit has the message terminator character (usually a
newline) appended, rather than a separator placed between entries.
This means that the final entry of a single-line format will be properly
terminated with a new line, just as the "oneline" format does.
For example: